(no subject)

[pedanther]

When I got home from work, I found that in my absence a phone-survey robot had attempted to administer a customer experience survey to the answering machine.

Considering that the answering service and the survey robot are both Telstra's, I'd have thought they'd have designed the latter to recognise when it was talking to the former.

The finishing touch: The subject of the customer experience survey was the phone call I made to Telstra earlier this week to have the answering service switched on.

Comments

[rdmasters.livejournal.com]

Oh, that made me laugh!

It is almost as good as what one guy I know did at his work. He works on VOIP systems, something that that company specialises in, and he got fed up with telemarketers.

So.

He worked out a fairly good algorithm for determining if a call was a telemarketer. Once the system got such a call, it would divert it to a menu system - you know the sort: 'Press 2 to flange the veblefitzer, Press 7 to launch a nuclear strike.' That sort of thing, except that it offered reasonable options, and one of them (set at random each time) seemed to offer a direction towards talking to a human. Except, of course, there wasn't one - just another menu - an infinite number of them, in fact.

Meantime, the system would keep track of the options picked, and how long the call lasted. The best they had when he told me about it was about ten minutes!

[thisbluespirit]

It sounds like it could soon become a Red Dwarf sort of situation... Love the idea of the two machines talking to each other! *shakes head*

[john_amend_all]

Please tell me the conversation went:
IDENTIFY YOURSELF
YOU WILL IDENTIFY FIRST
STATE YOUR IDENTITY
and so on.

[arcadiagt5.livejournal.com]

Please tell me that is going on the market for personal use!

[pedanther]

Alas, no. The answering machine didn't say anything after the "please leave your message" message (which the survey robot ignored, because it was in full flight explaining why it had called). So it was more like:

"Question 1: Identify yourself."
"..."
"You have to answer the question before we can proceed."
"..."
"Perhaps you haven't noticed that your phone has buttons with numbers written on them. You can press one of those to give your answer."
"..."
"Fine, then. Thank you for your co-operation." *click*